Chester County Recorder of Deeds Richard T. Loughery has brought suit against several of the nation’s largest banks and other participants in the residential mortgage industry to recover millions of dollars in recording fees for mortgage assignments the banks failed to record in the County’s public land records, a press release said.
Don’t expect any resolution soon. The lawsuit is pending before Judge Jeffrey Sommer and is expected to go to trial next October.
Loughery estimates that as much as ten million dollars in recording fees may be due from the banks.
The suit, filed on Oct. 10 in the Court of Common Pleas of Chester County, names Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase Bank, and Wells Fargo Bank, among others, as defendants.
The complaint asserts that the defendants conspired to circumvent the County’s Recorder of Deeds Office and evade paying recording fees by creating a private electronic registry system known as MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems) to track mortgage assignments among themselves.
“This practice violates the Commonwealth’s recording laws and has caused gaps, omissions and inaccuracies to appear in the County’s land records which undermine the integrity of our public land recording system,” said Loughery.
“For hundreds of years the citizens of Chester County have relied on the accuracy and completeness of our records to verify title to properties, trace ownership of land, and know who holds the mortgages on their properties,” Loughery added.
“Because of the banks’ use of MERS, property owners are no longer able to verify the true identity of the holders of their mortgages because thousands if not tens of thousands of mortgage assignments have not been publicly recorded and do not appear in our records,” Loughery said.
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